1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of testing, provisioning, maintenance and management of a network system, device or a solution. More particularly, the invention relates to the generation of device response templates.
2. Background and Description of the Related Art
In executing a test or communication sequence, a device or a network system can respond with information that is useful for subsequent test or communication steps. Some of it is static in nature, such as its physical identification characteristics. Some of it is dynamic in nature, such as status information about processing results or configuration settings. It is desirable to use this information as input for later test steps, rather than having to manually query the device to update the test cases prior to execution. In order to capture this information, one must analyze device responses to selected commands. These results are not necessarily in a standard format. In the current art of testing and scenario execution, this requires one to either write specialized software to find the patterns in the returned data and transform it into useful variables, or to manually update test sequences. Neither one is a desirable result, as it prevents tests from being automated.
In the prior art, as illustrated in FIG. 1, one would manually step through a test or other scenario sequence until reaching the desired step 101. The step would then be executed 102, and the resulting information captured on the user's display 103. The user would then manually calculate the position of the data value in the response 104 and write customized code 105, which can then be inserted and integrated into a test script 106.